About Me

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Below is an oped by a new friend whom I have met in NY 2 weeks ago during the 2nd ICCC sponsored by Heartland Institute. The author, Dr. Willie Soon, is a Malaysian-American solar and climate scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. This is his personal opinion based upon 18 years of scientific research.

This article further convinced me that the "anthropogenic climate change" theeory is wrong. CO2 is not a pollutant. It's a gas that comes out of our nose and mouth when we exhaule, a gas that comes out from the mouth and nose of our dogs, cows, chickens, other animals. It's a gas that plants, flowers and trees "inhale".

The many scientific evidence that Astrophysicists, meteorologists, geologists, etc. have gathered showed that there is NO correlation between CO2, much less man-made CO2 emission, and global climate. Rather, it's the sun -- solar irradiance, sun spots cycles, other solar activities.

The theory that climate change is chiefly caused by solar influences “is no longer tenable,” says US National Academy of Sciences president Ralph Cicerone. Carbon dioxide, he argues, is the key driver of recent climate change. I beg to differ.

The amount and distribution of solar energy that we receive varies as the Earth revolves around the Sun and also in response to changes in the Sun’s activity. Scientists have now been studying solar influences on climate for 5000 years.

Chinese imperial astronomers kept detailed sunspot records. They noticed that more sunspots meant warmer weather on Earth. In 1801, the celebrated astronomer William Herschel noticed that when there were few spots, the price of wheat soared -- because, he surmised, less “light and heat” from the Sun resulted in reduced harvests.

Is it true then that solar radiation, which supplies Earth with the energy that drives our climate, and caused so many climate shifts over the ages, is no longer the principal influence on climate change?

The UN’s climate panel claims there is scientific “consensus” that man-made CO_2 emissions are causing “dangerous” climate change. However, its 2007 Climate Assessment is fraught with serious scientific shortcomings in its discussion of the Sun’s influence on Earth’s climate.

The UN said direct measurements of solar radiation since 1979 show little increase. However, this conclusion depends upon disparate and adjusted measurements that were combined from several satellites and may be incorrect.

Between 1645 and 1715, sunspots were very rare and temperatures were low. Then sunspot frequency grew until, between 1930 and 2000, the Sun was more active than at almost any time in the last 10,000 years. The oceans can cause up to several decades of delay before air temperatures respond fully to this solar “Grand Maximum.” Now that the Sun is becoming less active again, global temperatures have fallen for seven years.

Next, the UN said estimates of the increase in solar radiation over the past 400 years should be reduced. The basis for this claim was a modeling study by the US Naval Research Laboratory. However, the Navy computer program was not designed to reach such conclusions, as it has no routine to calculate solar radiation.

We have known for nearly 80 years that small changes in solar activity can cause large climatic changes. Where sunlight falls, for how long, and with what effect, determine how climate will respond.

The most recent scientific evidence shows that even small changes in solar radiation have a strong effect on Earth’s temperature and climate.

In 2005, I demonstrated a surprisingly strong correlation between solar radiation and temperatures in the Arctic over the past 130 years. Since then, I have demonstrated similar correlations in all the regions surrounding the Arctic, including the US mainland and China.

The close relationships between the abrupt ups and downs of solar activity and of temperature that I have identified occur locally in coastal Greenland; regionally in the Arctic Pacific and north Atlantic; and hemispherically for the whole circum-Arctic, suggesting that changes in solar activity drive Arctic and perhaps even global climate.

There is no such match between the steady rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration and the often dramatic ups and downs of surface temperatures in and around the Arctic.

I recently discovered direct evidence that changes in solar activity have influenced what has been called the “conveyor-belt” circulation of the great Atlantic Ocean currents over the past 240 years. For instance, solar-driven changes in temperature, and in the volume of freshwater output from the Arctic, cause variations in sea surface temperature in the tropical Atlantic 5-20 years later.

These previously undocumented results have been published in the journal /Physical Geography/. They make it difficult to maintain that changes in solar activity play an insignificant role in climate change, especially over the Arctic.

The hallmark of good science is the testing of a plausible hypothesis that is then either supported or rejected by the evidence. The evidence in my paper is consistent with the hypothesis that the Sun causes climatic change in the Arctic.

It invalidates the hypothesis that CO_2 is a major cause of observed climate change -- and raises serious questions about the wisdom of imposing cap-and-trade or other policies that would cripple energy production and economic activity, in the name of “preventing catastrophic climate change.”

Bill Clinton used to sum up politics by saying, “It’s the economy, stupid!” Now we can fairly sum up climate change by saying, “It’s the Sun, stupid!”

6 comments:

Willie Soon is a discredited scientist who has received money from Exxon Mobile to deny global warming. He is the one who caused all the embarrasment for Sarah Palin, with his fraudulent Polar Bear study, which she cited in her opposition to having it listed as an endangered species.

Solar irradiance varies very little with the solar cycle.....about .01%. Solar activity peaked in 1958, and we have never seen a sunspot cycle as big. The sunspot cycle does not correlate with warming. In fact, sunspots are COOLER areas on the surface of the sun, not warmer.

Keeping in mind that windmills are hazardous to birds, be wary of the unintended consequences of believing and contributing to the all-knowing environmental lobby groups. The climate celebrities are linking climate and the economy. Yes, there has been warming since the Pleistocene. Climate is a multiple input, multiple loops, multiple output, and complex system. The facts and the hypotheses, however, do not support CO2 as a serious 'pollutant'. In fact, it is plant fertilizer and seriously important to all life on the planet. It is the red herring used to unwind our economy. That issue makes the science relevant.Water vapour (0.4% overall by volume in air, but 1 – 4 % near the surface) is the most effective green house gas followed by methane (0.0001745%). The third ranking greenhouse gas is CO2 (0.0383%), and it does not correlate well with global warming or cooling either; in fact, CO2 in the atmosphere trails warming which is clear natural evidence for its well-studied inverse solubility in water: CO2 dissolves in cold water and bubbles out of warm water. The equilibrium in seawater is very high; making seawater a great 'sink'; CO2 is 34 times more soluble in water than air is soluble in water.CO2 has been rising and Earth and her oceans have been warming. However, the correlation trails. Correlation, moreover, is not causation. The causation is studied, however, and while the radiation from the sun varies only in the fourth decimal place, the magnetism is awesome. “Using a box of air in a Copenhagen lab, physicists traced the growth of clusters of molecules of the kind that build cloud condensation nuclei. These are specks of sulphuric acid on which cloud droplets form. High-energy particles driven through the laboratory ceiling by exploded stars far away in the Galaxy - the cosmic rays - liberate electrons in the air, which help the molecular clusters to form much faster than climate scientists have modeled in the atmosphere. That may explain the link between cosmic rays, cloudiness and climate change.” As I understand it, the hypothesis of the Danish National Space Center goes as follows:Quiet sun → reduced magnetic and thermal flux = reduced solar wind → geomagnetic shield drops → galactic cosmic ray flux → more low-level clouds and more snow → more albedo effect (more heat reflected) → colder climateActive sun → enhanced magnetic and thermal flux = solar wind → geomagnetic shield response → less low-level clouds → less albedo (less heat reflected) → warmer climateThat is how the bulk of climate change might work, coupled with (modulated by) sunspot peak frequency there are cycles of global warming and cooling like waves in the ocean. When the waves are closely spaced, the planets warm; when the waves are spaced farther apart, the planets cool.The ultimate cause of the solar magnetic cycle may be cyclicity in the Sun-Jupiter centre of gravity. We await more on that. Although the post 60s warming period appears to be over, it has allowed the principal green house gas, water vapour, to kick in with more humidity, clouds, rain and snow depending on where you live to provide the negative feedback that scientists use to explain the existence of complex life on Earth for 550 million years. Ancient sedimentary rocks and paleontological evidence indicate the planet has had abundant liquid water over the entire span. The planet heats and cools naturally and our gasses are the thermostat. Check the web site of the Danish National Space Center. http://www.space.dtu.dk/English/Research/Research_divisions/Sun_Climate/Experiments_SC/SKY.aspx

The comment by "Tad" is ad hominem attack, it is attacking the bearer of the news, not the news itself.

I saw the links given, there was no chart showing that solar activity has little or zero correlation with global temperature, past and present. Dr. Willie Soon showed lots of charts showing direct fit between solar activities and global temperature.

Nonoy, have you tried clicking on your Heartland Institute link? It leads nowhere.

My mention of Willie Soon's misadventures is not an ad hominem. Those are facts.

But when Willie Soon calls climate scientists "Stupid" ("It's the Sun, Stupid"), that in fact is an ad hominem.

Are you saying that it is wrong to point out that Willie is hardly a reliable source for information on climate? He is the one who produced that phoney study on polar bears, and he is the one who needs to answer for it.

You mentioned his graphs. He shows less than one tenth of one percent change in solar radiance causing "temperature anomalies", without explaining what the source of data is or what the meaning is of a temperature "anomalie". He also confuses sunspot numbers with warming effects from the sun, and they just do not correlate.

Again, as I wrote above, take a look at sunspot cycles in the 20th century. If sunspots cause warming, then why didn't global warming peak in 1958-1959, the peak of sunspot cycle 19?

Here is a source of historical sunspot data.

http://tinyurl.com/d7svb4

The second chart from the top shows sunspot activity for the entire 20th century.